Name- - - - - - -
4/25/2007
1. Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after
he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and
my feet and hands are like theirs.
-Santiago, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
What is the tone of this passage? List at least three words that helped you determine that.
2. Sailing across the bay to the Cheniere Caminada, Edna felt as if she were being borne
away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening-­
had snapped the night before when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift
whithersoever she chose to set her sails. Robert spoke to her incessantly; he no longer
noticed Mariequita. The girl had shrimps in her bamboo basket. They were covered with
Spanish moss. She beat the moss down impatiently, and muttered to herself sullenly.
-Edna, THE AWAKENING
What is the initial tone? What is the secondary tone and what causes the tone to shift?
3. Anyway, these two nuns were sitting next to me, and we sort of struck up a
conversation. The one right next to me had one of those straw baskets that you see nuns
and Salvation Army babes collecting dough with around Christmas time.
-Holden Caulfield, CATCHER IN THE RYE
What is the tone of this passage? Describe the diction. How are the two related in this
passage (discuss the actual words he uses to convey the tone)?
4. Droll thing life is-that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile
purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself-that comes too
late-a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
-Marlow, HEARTH OF DARKNESS
Provide commentary for this passage. Remember to ask the question, How is this like
life? Pay close attention to tone and the adjectives he uses. (At least three sentences.)
Name- - - - - -
4/25/2007
5. What rhetorical devices occur in the following lines/passages?
a. All the world's a stage and the men and women merely players. _ _ _ _ _ __
b. The boulder was as large as the sun. _ _ _ _ _ __
c. The herdsman held fast to his hapless sheepfold. _ _ _ _ _ __
6. Give examples of the three types of irony (you can make stuffup):
a. verbal
b. dramatic
c. situational
Tone Words
Satiric/Ironic
a sense ofdisillusionment, distrust ofall
appearances, a mocking or cynical outlook
Comedic
moderated optimism, realistic beliefin
perfectibility, hope for improvement (we
know life is not perfect, and the pessimism
that comes about turns to black comedy)
Romantic
extreme sincerity, idealized outlooks,
virtues/vices, heroes/villains, excessive
optimism
Tragic/Dramatic
straightforwardness, profound awareness
ofmortality, a sense ofloss ofperfection or
goodness, awareness ofsin and evil, a fall
from greatness
I
Expositional
matter-of-fact, informational and unbiased,
most literary pieces will not be this way though
they may seem like it on the surface
(
~~erica~iterature
National Era 1828 - 18361
Post-Civil War
Revolutionary
Colonial
. 1630 to 1760
1865 - 1918
1760 - 1787
American Renaissance
1830 - 1860
first distinctly American
literature about
religious writings, histories, politics and patriotism
writing but with some hints of industrialization and
diaries
European Romanticism;
westward expansion;
regionalism; shift from
nature and self-reliance;
transcendentalism
romanticism to realism
RevolutionarylDe
Romanticism
Colonial Writing
Realism
1492 to 1776
mocratic Writing
1820 - 1860
1860 - 1900
1776 - 1820
Abigail Adams;
William Cullen Bryant; James
William Bradford; Anne
Henry Adams;
John Adams; Philip Fenimore Cooper; Emily
Bradstreet; John Cotton;
Ambrose Bierce; Willa
Freneau; Alexander Dickinson; Ralph Waldo
Cather; Kate Chopin;
Benjamin Franklin; Anne
Hamilton; John
Emerson; Philip Freneau;
Hutchinson; Cotton Mather;
Stephen Crane;
Jay; Thomas
Nathaniel Hawthorne; Oliver
Samuel Sewell; Captain John
Frederick Douglass;
Smith; Edward Taylor; John
Jefferson; James
Wendell Holmes; Washington
W.E.B. Du Bois; Ralph
Madison; Thomas
Irving; Henry Wadsworth
Waldo Emerson; Bret
Winthrop
Payn; Phillis
Longfellow; James Russell
Hart; Henry James;
Wheatley
Lowell; Herman Melville; Edgar Sarah Orne Jewett; Jack
Allan Poe; Harriet Beecher
London; James Russell
Stowe; Henry David Thoreau;
Lowell; Edgar Lee
Noah Webster; Walt Whitman;
Masters; Herman
John Greenleaf Whittier
Mellville; Mark Twain;
Booker T. Washington;
Edith Wharton
Knickerbockers: Irving,
Cooper, Bryant; Concord
Group: Emerson, Hawthorne,
Thoreau; Cambridge Scholars:
Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell;
Fireside Poets: Longfellow,
Whittier, Holmes
Regionalists (Local
Color): Bierce, Cather,
Chopin, Harte, Jewett,
Twain, Wharton
(
Post-WWI (Modern)
1918 1946
"Lost Generation
literature; sense of
fragmentation from society
and even from self
11
Post-WWII
(postmodern)
1946 to Present
large variety ofstyles,
topics; much
experimentation; forms
ofcriticism explode
Modernism
1900 - 1942
Postmodernism
1942 - Present
Sherwood Anderson; John
Cheever; e. e. cummings;
Hilda Doolittle; John Dos
Passos; Theodore Dreiser;
William Faulkner; F. Scott
Fitzgerald; T.S. Eliot;
Robert Frost; Lillian
Hellman; Ernest
Hemingway; Sinclair Lewis;
Marianne Moore; Flannery
O'Connor; Eugene O'Neill;
Katherine Anne Porter; John
Steinbeck; Wallace Stevens;
Ezra Pound; Carl Sandburg;
Upton Sinclair; Gertrude
Stein; Eudora Whelty;
Thornton Wilder; Tennessee
Williams; William Carlos
Williams; Thomas Wolfe
Edward Albee; A. R.
Ammons; John Ashbery;
James Baldwin; Imamu Amiri
Baraka; John Barth; James
Dickey; Donald Barthelme;
Saul Bellow; Elizabeth
Bishop; Robery Bly;
Gwendolyn Brooks; Truman
Capote; Ralph Ellison; Allen
Ginsberg; Nikki Giovanni;
Louise Gluck; Lorraine
Hansberry; Joseph Heller;
Langston Hughes; Zora Neale
Hurston; Jack Kerouac;
Randall Jerrell; Robert
Lowell; Morman Mailer;
Claude McKay; James Merrill;
W. S. Merwin; Arthur Miller;
Toni Morrison; Vladimir
Nabokov; Joyce Carol Oates;
Tim O'Brien; Tillie Olsen;
Charles Olson; Sylvia Plath;
Thomas Pynchon; Adrienne
Rich; Theodore Roethke;
Philip Roth; J. D Salinger;
Anne Sexton; Gary Snider;
Mark Strand; John Updike;
Kurt Vonnegut; Alice Walker
Beat Poets: Ginsberg,
Kerouac; Black Mountain:
Olson, Ashbery, Bly, Merrill,
Wright; Harlem Renaissance:
McKay, Hughes, Hurston
Lost Generation: Pound,
Stein, Eliot, Cummings,
Hemingway, Dos Passos,
Faulkner, Fitzgerald
I
(
Sw( First and Second Rows
~------~
Colonial
1492 to 1776
Colonial
1630 to 1760
I
RevolutionarylDem
ocratic
1776 - 1820
Revolutionary
1760 - 1787
Romantic
1820 - 1860
--.- Realism
1860 - 1900
National 1828 18361
American Renaissance
1830 - 1860
Post-Civil War
1865 - 1918
f----.-----:-:---,
Twentieth Century Literature (Modern 1
Centur
Postmodern)
y Lit
1901 - 2000
Post-WWII (post modern)
Post-WWI (Modern)
1946 to Present
1918 - 1946
religiOUS writings, histories,
diaries
politics and patriotism
first distinctly American
writing but with some hints
ofEuropean Romanticism;
nature and self-reliance;
transcendentalism
literature about
industrialization and
westward expansion;
regionalism; shift from
romanticism to realism
"Lost Generation"
literature; sense of
fragmentation from society
and even from self
large variety styles, topics;
much experimentation;
forms ofcriticism explode
William Bradford; Anne
Bradstreet; John Cotton;
Benjamin Franklin; Anne
Hutchinson; Cotton Mather;
Samuel Sewell; Captain
John Smith; Edward Taylor;
John Winthrop
Abigail Adams; John
Adams; Philip Freneau;
Alexander Hamilton; John
Jay; Thomas Jefferson;
James Madison; Thomas
Payn; Phillis Wheatley
William Cullen Bryant;
James Fenimore Cooper;
Emily Dickinson; Ralph
Waldo Emerson; Philip
Freneau; Nathaniel
Hawthorne; Oliver
Wendell Holmes;
Washington Irving; Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow;
Herman Melville; Edgar
Allan Poe; Harriet Beecher
Stowe; Henry David
Thoreau; Noah Webster;
Walt Whitman; John
Greenleaf Whittier
Henry Adams; Ambrose
Bierce; Willa Cather;
Kate Chopin; Frederick
Douglass; W.E.B. Du
Bois; Ralph Waldo
Emerson; Bret Hart;
Henry James; Sarah Orne
Jewett; Jack London;
James Russell Lowell;
Edgar Lee Masters;
Herman Mellville; Mark
Twain; Booker T.
Washington; Edith
Wharton
Sherwood Anderson; John
Cheever; e. e. cummings;
Hilda Doolittle; John Dos
Passos; William Faulkner;
F. Scott Fitzgerald; T.S.
Eliot; Robert Frost; Lillian
Hellman; Ernest
Hemingway; Sinclair
Lewis; Marianne Moore;
Flannery O'Connor;
Eugene O'Neill; Katherine
Anne Porter; John
Steinbeck; Wallace
Stevens; Ezra Pound; Carl
Sandburg; Upton Sinclair;
Gertrude Stein; Eudora
Whelty; Thornton Wilder;
Tennessee Williams;
William Carlos Williams;
Thomas Wolfe
Edward Albee; A. R.
Ammons; John Ashbery;
James Baldwin; Imamu
Amiri Baraka; John Barth;
James Dickey; Donald
Barthelme; Saul Bellow;
Elizabeth Bishop; Robery
Bly; Gwendolyn Brooks;
Truman Capote; Ralph
Ellison; Allen Ginsberg;
Nikki Giovanni; Louise
Gluck; Lorraine Hansberry;
Joseph Heller; Randall
Jerrell; Robert Lowell;
Morman Mailer; James
Merrill; W. S. Merwin;
Arthur Miller; Toni
Morrison; Vladimir
Nabokov; Joyce Carol Oates;
Tim O'Brien; Tillie Olsen;
Charles Olson; Sylvia Plath;
Thomas Pynchon; Adrienne
Rich; Theodore Roethke;
Philip Roth; J. D Salinger;
Anne Sexton; Gary Snider;
Mark Strand; John Updike;
Kurt Vonnegut; Alice
Walker
Though writing in the modern era, Frost held to the Romanticism and Naturalism ofEmerson and Wordsworth
Here is a list of words that convey tone. It is by no means a complete list, but it is pretty comprehensive.
Tonal Words:
common: happy, angry, sad, serious, funny, mean-spirited
less common: ironic, sarcastic, mocking, facetious, impersonal, bitter, pessimistic, moralistic, objective,
witty, light-hearted, satiric, vindictive, derogatory, sympathetic, solemn, tragic, empathetic, impartial,
didactic, opinionated, comic, benevolent, malevolent, altruistic, contemptuous, demanding, commanding,
serious, whiney, whimsical, hilarious, morbid, pessimistic, begging, desperate, serene, whiney, dry
1. On a separate sheet of paper, defme all of the "less common" tonal words.
2. Put each word in the appropriate box below. If it has a negative (bad, mean, derogatory) meaning, place
it in the "Negative" box. If it has a positive (good, nice, helpful, etc.) meaning, place it in the "Positive"
box. Ifit is neither, place it in the "Neither" box.
Nee;ative
Positive
3. Write down all the words that are synonyms (or close to) for:
happy:
b. sad:
Neither
Things to remember:
1. Literary Analysis is 1) Assertion, 2) Evidence, and 3) Commentary
2. It's All About the Tone
3. Voice is different than Tone
Look for:
1. Setting
2. POV: A) first: active, passive, non-participant, relation to characters; B) third:
omniscient, limited, limited to whom?
3. Voice: What type of voice?
4. Tone and shifts in Tone
5. Allusions: literary, historical, biblical, popular culture
6. Type of Writing (fiction/nonfiction, genre, satirical, philosophical, etc)
7. Diction (slang, etc.)
8. Syntax (sentence structure)
9. Rhetorical devices (Figurative Language)
10. Imagery
11. Writer's intent
12. Author/time period connection
13. Evidence: repetition, context clues, detail
Rhetorical devices:
Figurative Language: antithesis, apostrophe, hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy,
oxymoron, personification, simile, symbolism, synecdoche, understatement
Other: foreshadowing, irony, juxtaposition, paradox, repetition, parallel structure
Tragedy
Tragedy. What does the word call to mind for you? How can it best be defined? Before
we defer to Aristotle for his definition (especially with its literary implications), let's
consider what it means to us as we use it in our own lives. Tragedy, in its most general
sense, means a human devastation-sudden, unforeseen and usually immense. It's a
devastation that can occur at many levels-the personal, the familial, the societal. A
personal tragedy could be perhaps the moment you learn the love of your life doesn't
love you in return. Such was the case with poor Wherther in Goethe's The Sorrows of
Young Wherther. At the familial level, we experience tragedy when we learn a family
member has passed away. In Romeo and Juliet, each other's love was requited, yet their
love was not to be since their families were in a blood feud. The knowledge of their joint
suicides was a tragedy on the grand scale for each family. An example of social, or
national, tragedy would be of course the loss of lives on September 11 at the World Trade
Towers. It is a gaping, common loss Americans feel any time we see images of the
wreckage at ground zero, knowing what mass of humanity would be exhumed from the
debris.
It is because we experience tragedy in our everyday lives that we find it in literature. We
find it earliest, and perhaps at its finest, in the classical tradition. Sophocles wasn't the
first to introduce tragedy in drama, but Sophocles refined it. And nowhere will we find a
better example of it than in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. I know what you're thinking. Ifit's
old, it can't be that good. It won't seem impressive to your young minds since the
landscape of Ancient Greece is unfamiliar to you. In short, the story will have nothing to
do with you. But it is the best, and most succinct, and it is the example we will use.
Now we are ready to invite Aristotle into our conversation. In his Poetics, Aristotle lays
out the guidelines for how a tragic play should be written. His criteria were used in the
Festival of Dionysus in his day, and are used to some extent, if at least unconsciously, in
our valuation of tragedies we see in film and read in literature in our own day.
Returning to the World Trade Towers, there's a striking tragic irony we feel when we see
images of the towers standing stalwart like twin giants guarding Manhattan. It is a tragic
irony of situation because we know their fate. And when we see images of those towers
with black plumes of smoke billowing skyward from their flanks, we feel a keen sense of
tragic irony because we know the fate of those poor souls still trapped inside: they will
come tumbling down with the buildings.
Shifflett
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Diction
Diction refers to the words the author chooses to express his or her ideas. The author
could use formal, informal, or neutral language. Informal language could be slang, also
referred to as vernacular and colloquial, or could simply be conversational.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake often fought about whether poetry should be
written in the vernacular (Coleridge) or in more fornlallanguage (Blake).
The American Henry James and many of his British Victorian counterparts wrote in a
highly formal style. Take the following sentence from James, for example:
Winterbourne, who denied the existence ofsuch a person, was quite unable
to discover, and he was divided between amazement at the rapidity ofher
induction and amusement at the frankness ofher persiflage.
Writing in the vernacular, especially in dialogue, became much more prevalent with local
color (or regionalism) in the United States beginning in the late 1800's. Here is a passage
from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Fin that illustrates vernacular.
Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over
everybody; and next he went a-charging up onto the platform, and the
preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it.
Diction also includes the author's choice of figurative language (hyperbole, metaphor,
simile, metonymy, etc.). When Forrest Gump said "Jenny and me go together like peas
and carrots," both the vernacular and the simile are a part of Forrest's diction.
Diction is not the same thing as Style. Style is an author's distinctive use of all the
literary elements including diction, rhythm, imagery, sentence structure and length, etc.
So style is a larger category of which diction is a part.
Shifflett
Irony
Generally speaking, irony occurs when there is a big difference between what is said and
what is meant or in what we think is going to happen in a situation and what actually does
happen.
Strictly speaking, verbal irony occurs when what is said is opposite of what is meant.
For instance, let's say you go to school and get your lunch money stolen, you fail three
tests, and you find out your best friend has been spreading rumors about you. Then, you
come home and your parents ask you how your day was. If you reply that your day was
wonderful. .. spectacular ... you've never had a better day in your life, then you would
probably be using verbal irony.
Situational irony occurs in a situation where the opposite, or something very different,
happens from what the reader or audience thinks will happen. Mark Twain's The Bad
Little Boy is a perfect example. The reader thinks that because the boy is so bad, he's a
rapscallion at the least, we think that in the end he will "get what's coming to him."
However, in the end he doesn't. In fact he becomes a successful lawyer. Notice how
situational irony is intricately bound with plot. The events of the plot don't turn out the
way we think they will.
A third type of irony is dramatic irony. This occurs when the reader or audience has
more knowledge about a character's fate than the character does. In horror movies, when
the babysitter walks into the garage not knowing that an axe murderer is waiting for
her-this could be considered dramatic irony.
The ironic tone is one of the most important of all the tone words. If a narrator is using
an ironic tone, then the narrator is stating the opposite, or something very different, than
what is meant. Ironic tones can be found in the following pieces: "The Other Paris" by
Mavis Gallant and "The Bad Little Boy" by Mark Twain.
Name
----------------------
Date
----------------
Personification:
Lodged
The rain to the wind said, "You push and I'll pelt." They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged-though not dead. I know how the flowers felt. Robert Frost 1. In the poem above, what are the four objects in nature that are being personified?
2. What are the human actions that occur with each object?
3. How does the narrator use this as an analogy for human emotion? In other words, how
should the objects in nature feel about what's happening to them?
4. What object does the narrator identify with? What do you suppose might have
happened to the narrator to feel this way?
5. What object in nature would you personally identify with? Why?
Signs of the Times
Era Name:
One or Two Sentence Characterization
Major WorldIN ational Events
People
Buzz Words
Authors/Works
Dates:
Name -----------------------
Date
----------------
Personification:
Lodged
The rain to the wind said, "You push and I'll pelt." They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged-though not dead. I know how the flowers felt. Robert Frost 1. In the poem above, what are the four objects in nature that are being personified?
2. What are the human actions that occur with each object?
3. How does the narrator use this as an analogy for human emotion? In other words, how
should the objects in nature feel about what's happening to them?
4. What object does the narrator identify with? What do you suppose might have
happened to the narrator to feel this way?
5. What object in nature would you personally identify with? Why?